Thanx Mark. I understand the doc that you sent me, which speaks to the last point, in that I have not registered the existing virtual machines in the 5.5 yet in anticipation of testing the vstorage. I guess, another way of explaining my hang up is that I have found no documentation on what actually happens to the disk drives during these processes of being added to a cluster or being added to vstorage, etc. (a day in the life of a hard drive..). I am seeing both of these operations as similar to a software raid implementation and I fear that as part of this process the boot sector of the disk maybe written to (or sometimes called initialized) resulting in an immediate and complete data loss. This is likely a possibility because in any multi disk scheme you have to look to write identifying information to the various drives if you want to attempt a reliable recovery in the case of controller failure. If the VMs are registered, ESXi may just implement a procedure to move those files before requisitioning the hard drive space (once it is in a pooled resource you really don't know where the data actually is anyway). So I guess my choices are as follows:
A.
1. Register VMs on local host
2. Join hosts to cluster
3. implement a migration to the new data array
4. implement vstorage
B.
1. Join hosts to the cluster
2/3. migrate data and register machines to cluster in no order of preference
4. implement vstorage
C.
1. Join hosts to cluster
2. implement vstorage
3. register VMs to cluster
4. migrate machines to preferred datastore
Which looks best?